Or anything else concerning, for that matter. (BPA, maybe?)
I eat a tin of these basically every day. Have been doing so for well over a year now.
No, I’m not doing the whole “sardine diet” or whatever it’s called where you eat nothing but sardines. I’m proud to say I started eating sardines daily before that fad came up. And I eat a lot more than just sardines.
Anyway, I know “fish” in general tends to have high levels of mercury, but I’ve heard that basically the amount of harmful heavy metal sort of toxins in fish generally varies directly with the lifespan of the particular type of fish in question. (The longer it’s been swimming around in mercury-laden (or whatever-laden) water and eating mercury-laden (or whatever-laden) stuff, the more mercury will build up in its system by the time its caught, cooked, put on a table, and consumed by a human.) And I’ve heard that sardines in particular are quite low in such harmful toxins. (Maybe anchovies would be even lower? Not sure.)
My googling for an answer to the question of whether the level of harmful stuff in sardines is so low that eating them daily wouldn’t be an issue hasn’t really yielded helpful results. So, why not ask here?
(I have heard that EVOO is “better for you” (whatever that means, specifically) than non-virgin olive oil. And the particular brand of sardines in “olive oil” I get don’t say “virgin” anywhere on the packaging, so that might be a reason to switch brands. Not sure whether it’s really worth it or not. And the other brands are always way more expensive.)
Sardines are one of the few fish that has a very negligible amount of mercury in them.
Tuna, especially albacore, has way more mercury in it and you’d still need to be eating like 7 cans a day to risk mercury poisoning.
There should be no risk of lead poisoning unless the can they come in is made out of lead for some reason.
Really? I feel like I’ve had doctors tell me to avoid tuna more than once a week. (Not that it matters in my case)
Mercury in fish is caused by coal mining runoff, mainly caused by mines in the US. Thanks to renewables, it’s not nearly as big a problem anymore. But it will be again once the BBB takes effect.
Most of the mercury that ends up in the environment due to coal is from emissions that happen when it is burned. It settles all over the land and eventually gets washed into the ocean.
Building renewables does not solve this problem; only ending the use of coal will do that. For now, worldwide coal use remains near record highs.
And China is by far the biggest source of it.
Because we pay them to burn the coal instead of burning it here
We pay them to produce products instead of producing them here, they CHOOSE to burn coal because it’s cheap but are rapidly building renewables
Thanks for pointing this out. It is imperative that people understand the reality of the energy transition and move away from the spotty doomsday or otherwise reporting on the topic.